Qiu Xiaofei, Bare, 2023-24, oil on linen, 200 x 250 cm
2024. Qiu Xiaofei
Qiu Xiaofei’s first solo show in Europe, “BARE,” presented recent paintings and drawings that mix Asian and Western traditions in a vibrant palette, depicting distorted figures and evoking metamorphosis and transcendence. The works’ connections range from Latin American magical realism and European psychoanalysis to allegories borrowed from ancient Chinese poetry—the exhibition title comes from a Ming dynasty poem by Wang Zhideng regarding the bare state of the untamed soul.
Bare, 2023–24, the painting that lent its title to the show, depicts a bed with kaleidoscopic textile patterns, on which lies a naked elderly person with a big white mustache and long hair, showing breasts, elongated fingers, and clawed toes. The figure is covered by a zebra coat. This work refers, again, to Wang’s poem, in which a man wakes from a long sleep to realize he is old. The figure is surrounded in Qiu’s painting by an intricate and chimerical ecosystem: trees with dancing arms, winding bridges that snake among multistory Soviet-style buildings, tunnels excavated in gigantic rocks that reveal their profusely colored nuclei. Next to sphinx trucks and castles flanked by roller coasters, the artist painted a Chinese ceramic jar holding a smartphone that displays a beach portrait. This juxtaposition of ancient traditions and current technology—shuffling images, data, and words in a dizzying way—synthesizes psychedelic fantasy and a socioeconomic reflection with profound political and cultural implications. The central bed, as an allegorical symbol of the transition between life and death, reappears in the beautiful unostentatious ink-on-paper drawing Raven in Bed, 2024.
A playful scale difference between background and foreground is typical of the dimension of dreams: In works such as The One Tree Forest, 2022–24, we can’t tell whether the figures are gigantic or find themselves in a miniature environment. One more suitably scaled to them lies in the background, a landscape crowned with Orthodox church domes, reminiscences of the artist’s hometown, Harbin, the closest major Chinese city to the northern border with Russia. Even the Russian liturgical visual system is present in the cassock of one of the two humanlike protagonists in La Source, 2022–24, in which the figure pours an ointment into the roots of a bewitched tree as if consecrating it.
Qiu’s work explores fundamental questions about painting, confounding linear and easily comprehensible narratives, recognizable iconography, and long-established compositional systems, using varied pictorial languages to create mental representations of flawed subjects and their actions—transcending representation through troubled and deforming remembrance devices. He probes oil painting’s relevance in light of both the Western artistic incorporation of contemporary media and its cultural clash with Chinese painting traditions. Those traditions, often rooted in perfection through copying, now encounter techno-industrial methods centered on seriality and precise repetition, theoretically achieving flawless mimesis. In this way, his art parallels broader currents in contemporary Chinese art: for instance, the work of Cao Fei. For both artists, imaginative world-building clashes with present-day sociopolitical realities; theirs are hallucinatory, proto-apocalyptic reflections on a postsocialist, postindustrial existence.
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 63, no. 3, November 2024
Bare, 2023–24, the painting that lent its title to the show, depicts a bed with kaleidoscopic textile patterns, on which lies a naked elderly person with a big white mustache and long hair, showing breasts, elongated fingers, and clawed toes. The figure is covered by a zebra coat. This work refers, again, to Wang’s poem, in which a man wakes from a long sleep to realize he is old. The figure is surrounded in Qiu’s painting by an intricate and chimerical ecosystem: trees with dancing arms, winding bridges that snake among multistory Soviet-style buildings, tunnels excavated in gigantic rocks that reveal their profusely colored nuclei. Next to sphinx trucks and castles flanked by roller coasters, the artist painted a Chinese ceramic jar holding a smartphone that displays a beach portrait. This juxtaposition of ancient traditions and current technology—shuffling images, data, and words in a dizzying way—synthesizes psychedelic fantasy and a socioeconomic reflection with profound political and cultural implications. The central bed, as an allegorical symbol of the transition between life and death, reappears in the beautiful unostentatious ink-on-paper drawing Raven in Bed, 2024.
A playful scale difference between background and foreground is typical of the dimension of dreams: In works such as The One Tree Forest, 2022–24, we can’t tell whether the figures are gigantic or find themselves in a miniature environment. One more suitably scaled to them lies in the background, a landscape crowned with Orthodox church domes, reminiscences of the artist’s hometown, Harbin, the closest major Chinese city to the northern border with Russia. Even the Russian liturgical visual system is present in the cassock of one of the two humanlike protagonists in La Source, 2022–24, in which the figure pours an ointment into the roots of a bewitched tree as if consecrating it.
Qiu’s work explores fundamental questions about painting, confounding linear and easily comprehensible narratives, recognizable iconography, and long-established compositional systems, using varied pictorial languages to create mental representations of flawed subjects and their actions—transcending representation through troubled and deforming remembrance devices. He probes oil painting’s relevance in light of both the Western artistic incorporation of contemporary media and its cultural clash with Chinese painting traditions. Those traditions, often rooted in perfection through copying, now encounter techno-industrial methods centered on seriality and precise repetition, theoretically achieving flawless mimesis. In this way, his art parallels broader currents in contemporary Chinese art: for instance, the work of Cao Fei. For both artists, imaginative world-building clashes with present-day sociopolitical realities; theirs are hallucinatory, proto-apocalyptic reflections on a postsocialist, postindustrial existence.
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 63, no. 3, November 2024
Qiu Xiaofei, The One Tree Forest, 2022-24, oil on linen, 200 x 200 cm
Qiu Xiaofei, La Source, 2022-24, oil on linen, 120 x 80 cm
Qiu Xiaofei, Raven in Bed, 2024, ink on paper, 31.8 x 40.8 cm